Giuliani endorses Bush’s failed Social Security plan

August 17, 2007

After Bush won a second term, he entered 2005 in a relatively strong position. He boasted about having “political capital,” his approval rating was above 50%, and he looked at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and saw a very friendly Republican majority in both chambers. Everything was how Bush and his team wanted it.

And then the president kicked off a campaign to privatize Social Security. The more Americans heard about the plan, the more they hated it. After a few months of hearing Bush barnstorm the nation to sell his idea, Americans supported his handling of Social Security even less than his handling of Iraq. Bush’s poll numbers collapsed, and never recovered. It was, by some measures, the president’s jump-the-shark moment.

Even the most sycophantic of Republicans quickly realized that Bush’s Social Security policy was poison to be avoided at all costs. Given the public’s response, a candidate would have to be a blithering fool to embrace a plan that everyone hated.

And yet, here’s Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani stressed his desire to have private forces shape the country’s economy in education as well as in health care and Social Security. He said he supported President Bush’s unsuccessful proposal to allow people to invest some of their Social Security taxes in private accounts.

“I would have preferred, over my lifetime, if I could have invested some of that Social Security money myself,” said Giuliani, 63. “I think I would have done much better than the government did. I believe young people today, a lot of them feel that way. I think people who want a private option should be entitled to have it.”

Maybe Giuliani realized recently that he doesn’t want to be president after all, so he’s throwing the race on purpose. There’s no other rational explanation.

What keep political instincts! What masterful timing!

“This is how I’ll turn the corner: I’ll come out strong for private investment in Social Security just as the market has lost 1000 points in a week. Sure people are feeling the sting of watching their retirement accounts dwindle, and under my plan they would have no safety net beneath those losses, but my idea would at least bail out the brokers who would get to invest all of the Social Security money!”

You go, Rudi!

  • The more Rudy talks, the less I believe that rational thinking enters into the equation.

  • Yeah, ask someone who is currently receiving Social Security how comfortable he or she would be feeling about things if their retirement was contingent upon the performance of the current stock market.

    I won’t be ready to retire for more than 10 years, but I feel sick every time I look to see how my 401(k) is handling the market “corrections;” . A balanced and diversifed portfolio is softening the edges of this wild ride, but it’s still disconcerting to see the loss in value; I can only hope that over the long term, I will be okay, but I sure would not want to be held hostage to market conditions in my old age.

    As near as I can figure, those who favor privatization are people who are likely to already have the wherewithal to retire, or who benefit financially in some way from the establishment of milllions of investment accounts.

    The base will eat this up with a spoon, even if the majority will feel like gouging out their eyes with it.

  • I’m not sure to what extent the failure was the plan, and to what extent it was just Bush. If you look at a graph of his approvals over his whole presidency, it’s a long steady downslope punctuated by peaks at 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, and the capture of Saddam. And each of those peaks was lower then the previous one. All the while with steadily declining numbers in between. And you’ll recall that the more he got out and stumped for the SS thing, the worse it did.

    I think he just actually sucks at selling his own policies. Maybe Rudy thinks he can do it better.

  • I think people who want a private option should be entitled to have it

    Don’t people already have the option to invest privately on top of what they contribute to Social Security?

    Isn’t the point of Social Security to provide a tiny bit of cash to old people so they don’t starve to death if their work lives and private investments don’t happen to carry them all the way?

    Don’t all investments carry risk? Isn’t it a mathmatical certainty that if people start investing their social security money, some will lose it? What then?

    If followed to their logical conclusion, it seems like all of the Republican economic ideas lead you to the same place: Line up poor people in front of a big hole and shoot them in the head.

  • Anne:
    Why do you think even Republicans in Congress abandoned Bush on Social Security? Even the old foggie Republicans know that privatization is a bad idea. The Republicans didn’t want to get slaughtered over it.

  • I agree with Anne.

    Ghouliani is acting like a champion level prick.
    Reason why: The base is made up of champion level pricks.

    By the way… anybody know if ex-majors of NY are on the public dole for health care?

  • Each day, I become more convinced that Giuliani is the perfect GOP nominee!

    What we could use now is a few photos of Rudy marching in the Gay Pride parade in 1994. We also need someone in the media to ask him whether he had a long term affair with his aide, Chrystine Lategano. No matter how he answers, he’s sunk because everyone in NY knows he had one. To lie or not to lie?

  • Haik, just to answer your question first: the “point” of social security is more than simply to provide a tiny bit of cash to old people if their investments haven’t worked out – it’s to provide them a guaranteed base on top of which their investments can (if they are lucky) provide more of a cushion.

    and what’s really important about that “base” is that it is in the form of an annuity: you can outlive your investments, but you can’t outlive an annuity, because it’s guaranteed to you the rest of your life.

    this is where the kinds of remarks that giuliani made are so completely batshit insane. sure if rudy had put his payroll taxes into an s+p 500 fund, his capital base at age 65 would be a nice amount of money.

    but to play this game fairly, rudy then needs to try and convert that nice amount of money into a guaranteed annuity to run him, at a minimum, to age 100.

    he’ll very rapidly discover that social security is, in fact, a better deal if you plan on living a long life.

    as for giuliani, i think he’s being extremely rational: he can’t become president if he doesn’t secure the gop nomination.

    he can’t secure the gop nomination if he doesn’t spout a lot of things that are objectively deranged and nonsensical.

    so the rational course of action to try and become president for giuliani is to spout a lot of things that are objectively deranged and nonsensical, and then, if he gets the nomination, worry about getting elected.

  • Young people today feel they will never see a penny of their social security because the government is so deeply in debt through endless deficits by pandering to the rich that there will nothing left when the time comes for payment. They see the push for privatization as a poorly concealed attempt to get out of the contract and to steal the last remaining dollars left.

  • Guliani/McCain 2008! This time, why not the craziest?

    Anne is right (once again). This is supposed to benefit people who would love to get their hands on SSI money. And when the inevitable happens and people are left with nothing because some hedge fund manager got creative or one of the companies pulls an Enron, the current generation of workers will be expected to bail out the companies. “Hey, you don’t want the retirees to starve, do you?”

  • “He’s batshit insane. How is this guy a credible presidential candidate?”

    Ummm, see Bush, George W….

  • I really wanted Rudy to be the GOP nominee just to see the GOP southern strategy go into the crapper on Election Day. Looks like Rudy is self-destructing way too early.

  • I too would like to know who provides Rudy’s health coverage. As a cancer survivor, he’d have a hard time getting it as an individual. Of course being a millionaire makes it easier. In any case, some reporter or voter should ask him.

    But I can’t agree that this will appeal to the base. The base is mostly social and religious conservative (i.e., not the corporate folks) and these are people of mostly modest income–the Rush and O’Reilly listeners.

    I recall that at the time of Bush’s SS offensive, political analysts pointed out that he did not even have the social-conservative base behind him on this, because most of them understood very well the crucial role traditional SS plays in their standard of living during retirement.

    Since his announcement, virtually everything Rudy has done has been done to secure the Republican base, and thus the nomination. If he thinks this will, too, you have to question the quality of the advice he’s getting.

  • Savvy New Yorkers have long known that Rudy Kazootie is a nutcase control freak who is totally
    unfit to be president. The appropriate slogan should be: Rudy Kazootie for Dogcatcher,

  • Don’t believe the right wing horseshit that SS won’t be there when younger folks retire. Conservatives have always hated SS for reasons of dogma. And yes, the republican base didn’t go for the Bush fix, yet they still voted for him and other republicans who screw them consistently. There is no way to educate dedicated fools.

  • Emperor Rudy, aside from having no clothes, is deaf. He is rarely right, but never uncertain. If that’s not scary enough, just watch what will happen when some intrepid (or unbriefed) reporter asks him a question he doesn’t like. The media is once again giving his candidacy a free pass, which generally means the higher ups want only favorable (or trivial) coverage.

    Rudy-the-Reprehensible’s negatives are so glaring to anyone who saw him up close as mayor (me) that it is inconceivable that they have not yet dominated his campaign. But Bush’s negatives were also out there for any honest media person to publicize, but they too were buried under a ton of spin and bullshit by a Republican friendly media establishment.

    Aside from white upper-West-Side-coupon-clippers, who normally vote Democratic very heavily but who were convinced Rudy made the city ‘safe’ again, you won’t find very many New Yorkers, especially of color, who have anything good to say about him. Why? Because he treated them as invisible except as targets for his strutting black-shirt police department to prey on. Like Bush, Rudy only represented the people who voted for him. Everyone else didn’t exist. Basically he’s deaf, dumb, and blind to anything he doesn’t like, or doesn’t want to hear. And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t confront him with the inconvenient truth, or the obvious contradiction. He instantly morphs into Rudy-the-Ruthless, and he has a mighty swift sword.

    I don’t normally pray at all, but in this case I’m ready to: Spare us, O Lord, this psychopath.

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